How To Install and Configure Redis on Ubuntu

Introduction

Redis is an in-memory key-value store known for its flexibility, performance, and wide language support. In this guide, we will demonstrate how to install and configure Redis on an Ubuntu 16.04 server.

Prerequisites

To complete this guide, you will need access to an Ubuntu 16.04 server. You will need a non-root user with sudo privileges to perform the administrative functions required for this process. You can learn how to set up an account with these privileges by following our Ubuntu 16.04 initial server setup guide.

When you are ready to begin, log in to your Ubuntu 16.04 server with your sudo user and continue below.

Install the Build and Test Dependencies

In order to get the latest version of Redis, we will be compiling and installing the software from source. Before we download the code, we need to satisfy the build dependencies so that we can compile the software.

To do this, we can install the build-essential meta-package from the Ubuntu repositories. We will also be downloading the tcl package, which we can use to test our binaries.

We can update our local apt package cache and install the dependencies by typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential tcl

Download, Compile, and Install Redis

Next, we can begin to build Redis.

Download and Extract the Source Code

Since we won't need to keep the source code that we'll compile long term (we can always re-download it), we will build in the /tmp directory. Let's move there now:

Next, find the dir directory. This option specifies the directory that Redis will use to dump persistent data. We need to pick a location that Redis will have write permission and that isn't viewable by normal users.

We will use the /var/lib/redis directory for this, which we will create in a moment:

/etc/redis/redis.conf

. . .
# The working directory.
#
# The DB will be written inside this directory, with the filename specified
# above using the 'dbfilename' configuration directive.
#
# The Append Only File will also be created inside this directory.
#
# Note that you must specify a directory here, not a file name.
dir /var/lib/redis
. . .

Save and close the file when you are finished.

Create a Redis systemd Unit File

Next, we can create a systemd unit file so that the init system can manage the Redis process.

Create and open the /etc/systemd/system/redis.service file to get started:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/redis.service

Inside, we can begin the [Unit] section by adding a description and defining a requirement that networking be available before starting this service:

/etc/systemd/system/redis.service

[Unit]
Description=Redis In-Memory Data Store
After=network.target

In the [Service] section, we need to specify the service's behavior. For security purposes, we should not run our service as root. We should use a dedicated user and group, which we will call redis for simplicity. We will create these momentarily.

To start the service, we just need to call the redis-server binary, pointed at our configuration. To stop it, we can use the Redis shutdown command, which can be executed with the redis-cli binary. Also, since we want Redis to recover from failures when possible, we will set the Restart directive to "always":